Sorry saga playing loose with the facts

IT TAKES a special kind of stupidity to make a pig's ear of the Norman Conquest, but BBC1 have managed it with King & Conqueror.

- GARRY BUSHELL

The gloomy, £2million-an-episode eight-part saga, acquired from CBS, is riddled with historical howlers and duff dialogue (“Do you get the picture?”).

The Battle Of Hastings was a turning point in English history.

King Harold II lost largely because he had just defeated Harald Hardrada’s invading Norwegians at Stamford Bridge before marching his tired, depleted forces to the south coast to face William, the Duke of Normandy.

Thrilling enough you'd think. But lead writer Michael Robert Johnson couldn't just dramatise the facts, he says, because “the peaks and troughs of the emotions are never in the right place”. Instead, he’s taken more liberties than the Taliban.

For starters, William was 14 when Edward the Confessor was crowned in 1043. He wasn't there, he didn’t speak English, and he didn’t meet Harold Godwinson, the future king, until 1065 — the year before he invaded.